Deleuze After Kierkegaard

KRITIKE VOLUME EIGHT NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2014) 98-118
Article
Art as Authentic Life

Deleuze after Kierkegaard
Arjen Kleinherenbrink
Abstract: There is an underappreciated existentialist side to Deleuzes

philosophy, which frequently addresses the question of the best mode
of existence, and consistently does so in explicit dialogue with
Kierkegaard. Where Kierkegaard conceptualizes the possibility of
authenticity in terms of the knight of faith, Deleuze arrives at a more
impersonal notion of authenticity as an act which results in a work of
art purged from subjective connotations.
Keywords: Life, art, authenticity, ethics
Introduction
I
n the Fall of 1945, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Tournier attended Sartres
famous speech Existentialism is a Humanism. The two friends were
horrified by Sartres defense of human freedom and responsibility in
terms reminiscent of 18th century Enlightenment thought: we were floored.
So our master had had to dig through the trash to unearth this worn-out
mixture reeking of sweat and of the inner life of humanism.1 This
momentary shock eventually transformed into permanent disappointment:
even though he kept crediting Sartre as an inspiration, the only works
Deleuze ever repudiated were precisely a number of Sartrean articles written
in the 1940s.
These anecdotes are well known among Deleuze scholars, which may
explain why Deleuzes relation to existentialism remains underappreciated. 2
A handful of texts analyze his relation to Sartre, but not a single one explores
Deleuzes connection to that other famous existentialist: the Danish
philosopher Sren Kierkegaard. This is surprising because Deleuze makes
1 Franois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari Intersecting lives (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), 95.
2 Several exceptions exploring the Sartre-Deleuze connection include Boundas (1993),
Khalfa (2000), and Somers-Hall (2006).
2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_15/kleinherenbrink_december2014.pdf
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A. KLEINHERENBRINK 99
frequent use of Kierkegaards thought in ways that go far beyond casual

referencing.3 From Difference and Repetition to A Thousand Plateaus and
beyond, Deleuze consistently works with and through Kierkegaard whenever
he arrives at questions of the good life or of the best mode of existence.
I aim to trace this relation to Kierkegaard for two reasons.4 First,
Deleuzes ethics are generally held to be a blend between Stoic
disengagement, Spinozist beatitude, and Nietzschean affirmation.5 Though
this is not incorrect, it is certainly incomplete. The recipe needs to be
supplemented with a fourth, existentialist ingredient that concerns the
criteria for the result of our actions, in addition to our attitude towards them.6
Second, this explication will clarify Deleuzes frequent yet ever vague
insistence that art is simultaneously at the heart of life and of ethics.
The problem of a life
In the essay Immanence: A Life, Deleuze repeatedly insists that life is

best lived as a life, emphasizing the fourth person singular.7 Though this late
essay emphasizes the notion of a life with unprecedented force, it was already
introduced in The Logic of Sense, becoming increasingly explicit in and after
the publication of A Thousand Plateaus.8 Yet what does it mean? How to do it?
Moreover, why do it? Deleuze is not particularly forthcoming in answering
such questions, since his explanation consists in introducing a swirl of
unfamiliar neologisms, including affect, asignifying sign, becoming-
imperceptible, the restoration of immanence, and infinite speed. Yet this
3 In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explicitly states that his
conceptualization of repetition amounts to following Kierkegaards wish to carry out the

reconciliation of the singular with the general. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by
P. Patton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25.
4 To be clear: this text is not an exegetic work on Kierkegaard. Deleuze only refers to
Fear and Trembling, Repetition and some passages from the Papirer, a mere part of Kierkegaards
oeuvre. I will ignore the question of whether Deleuzes reading of Kierkegaard is adequate,
focusing instead on how Deleuze transforms Kierkegaard to fit his own problems. For a
Kierkegaardian response to Deleuzes reading, see Clars text from 1975.
5 For example, see James Williams, Gilles Deleuzes Logic of Sense - A Critical Introduction
and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

6 Deleuzes Nietzschean side has always emphasized activity (see his frequent
references to Nietzsche and dancing in Difference and Repetition). Adding a Kierkegaardian

element to the mix, so to say, would then create a nice balance of two passive or contemplative
aspects and two active aspects to Deleuzian ethics.
7 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness - Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, trans. by A.
Hodges and M. Taormina (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, 2007), 384.
8 Gilles Deleuze, The logic of sense, trans. by M. Lester (London: Athlone Press, 1990),
102-103.

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100 ART AS AUTHENTIC LIFE
is where Kierkegaard comes in.9 Deleuzes discussions on a life and the

associated neologisms just mentioned are permeated with references to and
use of Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling and Repetition, and it is with a detour
through these texts that we can uncover Deleuzes intentions.10
Life as a knight of faith
Fear and Trembling and Repetition famously address the problem of

how to become an authentic self. According to Kierkegaard this is a matter of
purging our motives for acting of all contingency and temporal displacement.
Only a relation of each present to an absolute can serve as sufficient ground to
grant authenticity to our existence. Kierkegaard identifies four contingent
modes of acting that must be avoided if such a relation with the absolute is to
be attained.11
The first is recollection. To act out of recollection means to long for the
restoration of a contingent past, so that the present will always fall short and
disappoint. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit,12 a mode
of living that stops life dead in its tracks by an undoing of movement and a
reversal of [lifes] course, a trying to get back to the point prior to
movement.13 The second is hope. To hope means to act on an envisioned
9 Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, trans. and ed. by H.V. Hong and
E.H. Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983). [Fear and Trembling will be
subsequently cited as FT, while Repetition as R, followed by section then page number]
10 To give two examples: ... what does becoming-imperceptible signify? [ ... ]
Becoming-imperceptible means many things. What is the relation between the (anorganic)
imperceptible, the (asignifying) indiscernible, and the (asubjective) impersonal? A first response
would be: to be like everybody else. That is what Kierkegaard relates in his story about the
knight of the faith, the man of becoming: to look at him, one would notice nothing, a bourgeois,
nothing but a bourgeois [ ... ]: after a real rupture, one succeeds in being just like everybody else.
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, trans. by
B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 279; become like everyone, but
in fact you have turned the everyone into a becoming. You have become imperceptible,
clandestine [ ... ]. Despite the different tones, it is a little like the way in which Kierkegaard
describes the knight of faith [ ... ]: the knight no longer has segments of resignation [ ... ], he
resembles rather a bourgeois, a tax collector, [ ... ] he blends into the wall but the wall has become
alive, he is painted grey on grey. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. by H.
Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 127. Also see A
Thousand Plateaus, 171, 197, 282, 543 n.66 and Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, trans. by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 73-74.
11 And not just two, as is often thought. For Kierkegaard, Hope and Recollection
are just as problematic as Aesthetic and Ethic existence.

12 R III, 174.
13 John D. Caputo, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Foundering of Metaphysics, in
R. L. Perkins ed., International Kierkegaard Commentary - Fear and Trembling and Repetition (Macon:
Mercer University Press, 1993), 208.

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future that may never become reality. Whereas recollection is too backward
to live up to the present, hope is too forward. The third contingent mode is
the aesthetic mode of existence, or to justify actions in terms of desires and
sentiments one just happens to have. 14 It refers to acts in which we pay no
mind to others, a foreclosure from the public sphere, which leads Kierkegaard
to call this mode hidden. The fourth is the ethical mode, which Kierkegaard
calls disclosed and universal. It is to act in accordance with the normative
framework of a society, rendering actions intelligible to all in principle. The
ethical mode still cannot yield authentic selfhood, as it never grants certainty
as to whether we are not just acting in order to be appreciated by others,
which would reduce a person to a limb of a larger body.15 Kierkegaard
gives the example of Agamemnons intended sacrifice of his daughter to
ensure favorable winds for the Greek fleet heading for Troy. 16 Even though
Agamemnon concedes his private interests to the universal, this cannot make
him an authentic self. He remains driven by the need to conform to societal
values that pertain to a contingent Greek universe.
These four modes can of course inspire noble and beautiful actions,
yet they risk the surrender of ones life. Aesthetically, to worldly distractions;
ethically, to social conformity; in recollection, to dreams of a past; in hope, to
longing for a future. Instead of hoping or recollecting, Kierkegaard insists that
we repeat: he who will merely hope is cowardly; he who will merely recollect
is voluptuous; he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically
he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is.17 Instead of
acting aesthetically or ethically, he insists on a religious mode of existence, the
only one in which one can be a single individual.18 This single individual is
the knight of faith, certain of authentic selfhood precisely because he abandons
all contingency in favor of an absolute relation with the absolute.19 Who is
this knight of faith who repeats, and how is the relation with the absolute
attained? To answer these questions, Kierkegaard famously employs the
example of Abraham.
14 This makes for slaves of the finite are frogs in the swamp of life and
benchwarmers that live absorbed in worldly joys (FT III, 91-92), stuck in an aesthetic illusion
(FT III, 135) of disdainful bourgeois philistinism (FT III, 89).
15 David Gouwens, Understanding, imagination, and irony in Kierkegaards
Repetition, in International Kierkegaard Commentary - Fear and Trembling and Repetition, 14. Also
see no one becomes an authentic self simply by absorbing the values of ones society. Stephen
Evans, Faith as the telos of morality: a reading of Fear and trembling, in ibid., 25; it is
unacceptable to make a goal of being approved by other people Morris, T. F., Constantin
Constantius search for an acceptable way of life, in ibid., 333.
16 FT III, 108.
17 R III, 174.
18 FT III, 105, 111, 124.
19 FT III, 106. Note that Kierkegaard thus counterintuitively aligns universality with
contingency, and opposes them to absoluteness and necessity.

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As is written, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

According to Kierkegaard, Abraham transcends the aesthetic and the ethical
by obeying God without hesitation. He does not perform the sacrifice for his
own sake (aesthetics) or for the benefit of his family (ethics). 20 This is further
confirmed by Abrahams concealment of his intentions to his loved ones. An
aesthetic silence would have been intended to prevent the slaying by
pretending that nothing had happened, not to help bring it about. 21 Ethically
speaking silence is not even a possibility, because the ethical mode requires
by definition that one justifies actions in terms of common sense. 22 Abraham
must act utterly alone since his intentions are in principle unintelligible for
others: though religiously he is about to sacrifice, ethically he is about to
commit murder.23 Yet this ambiguity does not yet make a knight of faith.
Abraham only deserves this title insofar as he has the absurd faith that by
abandoning everything he will regain what he resigns:
But to be able to lose ones understanding and along

with it everything finite, for which it is the stockbroker,
and then to win the very same finitude again by virtue
of the absurdthis appalls me, but that does not make
me say it is something inferior, since, on the contrary, it
is the one and only marvel.24
The knight of faith makes a twofold movement: surrendering the

finite and then seeing it restored by virtue of the absurd (God intervening at
the very last moment to save Isaac). This second part is crucial. Had Abraham
stopped after the first part (accepting the sacrifice of his son without absurdly
believing that Isaac would be restored to him), then he would merely be a
knight of infinite resignation. Resignation still relies on an ethical
understanding that there is something that, unpleasant as it may be, has to be
done.25 However, by absurdly believing that surrendering the finite will still
result in the restoration of the finite, Abraham moves beyond understanding
and resignation. This leap is absurd and paradoxical and thought cannot
penetrate it, not in the last place because it places a single individual higher
than the universal. Thus, Abraham becomes an authentic self, a single
individual living a present in an absolute relation with the absolute. When
20 For Abraham the ethical had no higher expression than family life. FT III, 158.
21 FT III, 158.
22 Abraham [ ... ] cannot speak. As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do
not do so, no one can understand me. FT III, 110.

23 FT III, 61-64, 66-67, 73, 82, 120.
24 FT III, 87.
25 FT III, 97.

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everything finite is restored to him after his leap of faith, he can be certain that
he is neither driven by selfish gain, nor by societal norms. 26 This is because he
repeats, and we now understand that to repeat is to regain what one has
surrendered earlier. Repetition allows for authenticity through the certainty
that one is not a slave to aesthetics, ethics, recollection, or hope, that one
cannot be reduced to a private individual or a social subject. 27 Only in this
mode of existence can existence be called earnest for Kierkegaard.28 This
leaping into an earnest existence is the first of two themes Deleuze adopts
from the Danish philosopher.29
The second is Kierkegaards description of how the knight of faith
should be played.30 Kierkegaard emphasizes how utterly devoid of spectacle
it would be to see a knight of faith. Indeed, we would exclaim: Good Lord,
is this the man, is this really the onehe looks just like a tax collector!31 Glory
and public recognition befall knights of infinite resignation, not knights of
faith. The former can be publically staged as paragons of virtue, and we cry
for them in sympathy because their actions correspond to our values. 32 And
even though with every breath, the knight of faith buys the opportune time
at the highest price, for he does not do even the slightest thing except by
virtue of the absurd, there is nothing spectacular in watching him do it.33 The
very marvel of faith according to Kierkegaard is that its movement is a mode
of existence in which all of life, including its most common and trivial aspects,
is restored to a person who thereby becomes a self, having left behind all other
modes of existence or attitudes to life that would have subjected him to past,
future, social doxa, or private passion. Hence, a knight of faith exists in such
a way that [his] contrast to existence constantly expresses itself as the most
beautiful and secure harmony with it, as the only happy man, the heir to
the finite.34
26 FT III, 106, 120.

27 Only the religious movement remains as the true expression for repetition ... R,
302, Pap. IV B112 n.d., 1843-1844; repetition is transcendent, a religious movement by virtue of
the absurd, R, 305, Pap. IV B112 n.d., 1843-1844.
28 R III, 133. Nevertheless, ethics does not contradict faith by definition and faith does
not always demand acting in violation of ethics. Kierkegaard merely asserts that faith is superior
to ethics and irreducible to it, not that it annuls it.
29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 127, 282; What is philosophy?, 74; Deleuze,
Difference and repetition, 11, 95; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 - The Movement Image, trans. by H.
Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1986), 114-116.
30 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 9; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 197,
279.
31 FT III, 90.
32 FT III, 89, 110, 115.
33 FT III, 91.
34 FT III, 100.

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These two figures, a movement putting a single individual in relation

to something absolute, and simultaneously retaining a completely normal
presence in the world, deeply influence Deleuze in conceptualizing a
preferable mode of existence. Simultaneously, his version of the problem of
becoming a single individual, or, in his terminology, living a life in the fourth
person singular, still differs from Kierkegaards. How could it be otherwise
when Deleuze demands a strict atheism in life and philosophy? 35
Abraham becomes Cain
As with Kierkegaards disavowal of recollection, Deleuze asserts that

history today still designates only the set of conditions, however recent they
may be, from which one turns away in order to become, that is to say, in order
to create something new.36 Where Kierkegaard dismisses the ethical and
aesthetic modes of existence, Deleuze also demands a determination purely
of thinking and of thought that wrests [existential modes] from the historical
state of affairs of a society and the lived experience of individuals in a
struggle against opinion.37 And in a striking parallel with the knight of faith
whose absurd faith cannot be adequately spoken of, Deleuze asserts that the
most admirable mode of existence is one that cannot be judged: better to be
a road-sweeper than a judge;
herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence

and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not
because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary
because what has value can be made or distinguished
only by defying judgment.38
With such similarities, it is not surprising that Kierkegaards knight

of faith is Deleuzes primary association when inquiring into the preferable
mode of existence.39 Yet this first response is no satisfying answer. Deleuze
35 Atheism is the philosophers serenity and philosophys achievement. Deleuze and
Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 92; Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, the
one principle of a violent atheism. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and philosophy, trans. by H.
Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 4; Religions are worth much less than
the nobility and the courage of the atheisms which they inspire. Deleuze, Two Regimes of
Madness, 360.
36 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 96.
37 Ibid., 70, 203.
38 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 8; Shunning judgment by others and rejoicing in
meeting someone who does not judge are also key themes in Repetition. See Morris Constantin
Constantius search for an acceptable way of life, especially pages 321-324: Here was an
actuality that was not concerned with judging him ... .
39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 279.

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agrees with Kierkegaard on which modes must be avoided, but cannot accept
a religious movement of faith as a solution:
Undoubtedly, faith possesses sufficient force to undo

habit and reminiscence [ ... ] However, faith invites us to
rediscover once and for all God and the self in common
resurrection. [ ... ] This is [Kierkegaards] problem: the
betrothal of a self rediscovered and a God recovered, in
such a manner that it is no longer possible truly to escape
from either the condition or the agent.40
By relying on God to restore the finite, the knight of faith is

immediately propelled back into the very conditions of private habit and
social mores that he needed to flee in the first place. For Kierkegaard, this is
the beauty of absurd faith. For Deleuze, it is a disappointment: one escapes,
only to rediscover oneself bound to the finite tighter than ever before.41 Yet
Deleuze does not intend to critique Kierkegaard as much as he wants to point
out that Kierkegaards solution falls short in Deleuzes own version of
Kierkegaards problem:
Kierkegaards knight of the faith, he who makes the

leap, are men [sic] of a transcendence or a faith. But they
constantly recharge immanence [ ... ], with the infinite
immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes
that God exists. The problem would change if it were
another plane of immanence. It is not that the person
who does not believe God exists would gain the upper
hand [ ... ]. But, on the new plane, it is possible that the
problem now concerns the one who believes in the
world, and not even in the existence of the world but in
its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once
again to give birth to new modes of existence [ ... ]. It may
be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our
most difficult task [ ... ]. The problem has indeed
changed.42
40 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 95.

41 Kierkegaard aims for a new ground and a God-relationship restored (and
enhanced) by the incarnation and atonement of the Son of God. Vincent McCarthy,
Repetitions repetitions, in International Kierkegaard commentary - Fear and Trembling and
Repetition, 277.
42 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 74-75.

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Deleuze shifts the parameters of the problem. It now concerns the

belief in possibilities of movement and new modes of existence in the world.
Authenticity is then no longer a matter of restoration, but of creation. The
knight of faith chooses one final mode of existence. Deleuze searches
something that escapes from private life, social conditions, recollection, and
hope in a more radical sense: something that can continuously generate
something unseen, not to restore the finite but to renew it. The obstacle to
such renewal is precisely transcendence. In everyday life, this can be religious
or cultural dogma that one is not supposed to question. In philosophy, it is
the idea of a ground or first principle. Transcendence ensures that all events
and things are watered down to mere permutations or reconfigurations of
something already known and established for all eternity.
Quite obviously, Deleuze counts the religious mode of existence
among such transcendent structures, and so the problem has changed.
Becoming an authentic self still requires dismissing personal desire, social
circumstance, and idealized pasts or futures, but religion has been added to
this list and all these modes of existence are discounted for being
contaminated with transcendence and opinion, which limit existence and
attempt to capture life in clear-cut schemas. The ideal can no longer be the
tranquil knight of faith; rather, we need a paragon of the creation of ruptures
in the prisons of life.43 The shining example is no longer Abraham: Deleuze
chooses Cain as his champion. Cain is the true man and a true man is one
who never ceases to betray God just as God betrays man.44 God betrays
man in representing transcendence par excellence. Absolute and not
contingent as He may be, God still functions as a displacement of the
justification of things from outside of themselves, i.e., as a position of
judgment. Restoration of immanence or allowing for the new without
pinning life to any limiting principle whatsoever demands that this betrayal
be betrayed. Such double betrayal is the only way to break with the doctrine
of judgment [that] has reversed and replaced the system affects.45 This
provides us with the starting point of Deleuzes solution to his reading of
Kierkegaards problem. The preferable mode of existence breaks with all
manifestations of stifling opinions and transcendent, untouchable principles,
including faith. For Deleuze, this entails creating affects, in relation to which
he introduces a complex series of neologisms.
43 Ibid., 47.
45 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 129.

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Affect, sign, fourth person singular
Affect is introduced to Deleuzes philosophy in two studies on

Spinoza. However, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze develops a markedly
post-Spinozist conceptualization of affect. He starts using the term in
response to a different problem: no longer Spinozas what can a body do?,
but the problem mentioned earlier: the possibility of a world in which new
modes of existence can emerge.46 Through this shift, affect becomes detached
from the body: affects are no longer feelings or affections, the flesh is now
considered too weak to carry the affect, and affects are now nonhuman
becomings of man.47 If affect is to play a part in breaking with the self and
with opinion, it must be able to effectuate a power that throws the self into
upheaval and makes it reel.48 It cannot concern a contingent person or body;
affects must be impersonal, an alternate current that disrupts signifying
projects as well as subjective feelings.49 What must affect be if it is to realize
such ambitious aims? First of all it is a being and not a process of affection.50
When asked what type of being this entails, Deleuze answers art, because
only art can declare as its aim to wrest the affect from affections as the
transition from one state to another.51 Affects are not simply encountered in
nature; their creation is a complex techne, and for Deleuze, it is highly rare
that a work of art truly creates an affect and manages to stand up on its own.52
To stand up on its own means that a work of art no longer refers to the lived
experience of either artist or spectator, that it does not represent particular
historical circumstances, that it neither recalls a past nor announces a future,
and hence there is only an affect when the work of art refers to nothing but
itself:
the young girl maintains the pose that she has had for
five thousand years, a gesture that no longer depends on
whoever made it.53

47 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 164, 178, 169/173.
49 Ibid., 233.
50 Affects are beings. Deleuze and Guattari, What is philosophy?, 164.
51 Ibid., 167.
52 Ibid., 164. This is also how one should understandaffects always presuppose the
affections from which they are derived, although they cannot be reduced to them. Gilles
Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. by D. W. Smith and M. E. Greco (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 140.

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This becomes Deleuzes hallmark of authenticity: not so much

authenticity for the self, but authenticity by the self by virtue of that which is
created. When successful, this drags the very materials from which the work
of art is composed into the affect: [even] the material passes into the
sensation.54 Sensations are not affections. A work of art is a bloc of
sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.55 Affects are
thus never encountered alone, but always intertwined with percepts.
Whereas affects are those entities that can generate affections, percepts are
those entities that can generate perceptions. A work of art as an affect-percept
compound is thus situated before language in the sense that it can come to
be talked about after being perceived and felt:
it is an utterable. We mean that, when language gets

hold of this material (and it necessarily does so), then it
gives rise to utterances which come to dominate or even
replace the images and signs, and which refer in turn to
pertinent features of the language system, syntagms and
paradigms, completely different from those we started
with.56
In addition, an affect-percept compound is eternal and thus absolute

because even if the material lasts for only a few seconds it will give sensation
the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this
short duration.57 The creation of affects is an activity of extraction,
detachment, a cutting of ties with all modes of existence that must be
dismissed on account of their capacity to enslave or imprison life in
transcendence and opinion:
The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and

neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the
page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting,
preestablished clichs that it is first necessary to erase, to
clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of
air from the chaos that brings us the vision [ ... ]. Because
the picture starts out covered with clichs, the painter
must confront the chaos and hasten the destruction as to
54Ibid., 193.
55Ibid., 164.
56 Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2 - The Time Image, trans. by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 29.


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produce a sensation that defies every opinion and

clich.58
This helps to understand what Deleuze means when writing that

affects respond to a necessity to break through opinion and clich by
creating new, as yet unknown statements [ ... ], asubjective affects, signs
without signifiance.59 Affects are asignifying signs because they do not refer
to or represent something outside of themselves. If a painter manages to
create an affect, a womans smile on a painting no longer has Lisas smile,
nor a typical 16th century expression, not even a smile consisting of this or
that specific type of reddish paint. This is not to say that an affect cannot
signify something; it is to say that an affect does not do so necessarily, and
that when it does, it is only in a second moment. 60 If it does not escape
immediate signification, it remains firmly stuck in the known, in clichs,
recognition, and opinion. This also explains Deleuzes resistance to judgment
because what else is judgment than to capture something in terms and criteria
belonging to something else? In the case of affect, this would annul
everything it can be. A successful affect is an asignifying sign, a double
betrayal that moves against or simply ignores what is already known and
accepted, and thus no [true] art and no sensation have ever been
representational.61 If an affect is to be judged, this must happen in terms of
the affect itself, if such a thing is possible. The power of art lies in the
possibility of the creation of affects and the power of affects lies in being
relationally undetermined and hence allowing for the new. From the
perspective of affect, any way of talking about, characterizing, or interpreting
a work of art is just one way, and even a multitude of ways can in principle
never exhaust the asignifying status of the affect. The introduction of affects
and asignifying signs already provides a sense of what Deleuze is working
towards. We are now in a position to return to the single individual or the
fourth person singular:
58 Ibid., 204. Also: everything that novelists must extract from the perceptions,
affections, and opinions of their psychosocial models passes entirely into the percepts and
affects to which the character must be raised without holding on to any other life. Ibid., 188.
60 [Art] is no less independent of the viewer or hearer, who only experience it after, if
they have the strength for It. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 164.
61 Ibid., 193. Also ... we attain to the percept and affect only as to autonomous and
sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experienced
them. Ibid., 168; signs [ ... ] are not signifiers. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88-
89.

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We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and

nothing more.62
In leaving behind all enslaving, stifling modes of existence, affect

becomes completely singular. It is no longer this or that smile, but simply a
smile. Deleuze borrows the notion of the fourth person singular from the
poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In the latters novel Her, the protagonist Andy
Raffine is obsessed with reaching the fourth person singular. He spends life
searching for something absolute instead of relative, for a girl exempt from
the small flaws of real women. Of course, he never finds a girl, but why? It is
because Andy longs for a thing so pure that he becomes unable to see himself
as a component in the viewing process.63 Andys search is doomed from
the start, precisely because he has the wrong understanding of the fourth
person singular: he looks for a girl, but still one as conceived of from his
perspective. However, Her also contains what Ferlinghetti calls the true fourth
person singular, the a ... that manages to detach itself from the longings
and desires of a subject.64 Ferlinghetti stages the true fourth person singular
as the one mode of existence in which disappointment and lack become
impossible: there is just the presence of a smile. The young girl whose smile
it is and the spectator moved or unmoved by it are only relevant in a
secondary sense. Quite understandably, this is an incredibly hard thing to
achieve: I keep slipping off [ ... ] because I and no one has the true fourth
sight to see without the old associational turning eye that turns all it sees into
its own.65
Nevertheless, this is Deleuzes criterion for authenticity: to leave
behind all modes of existence that are unable to generate the new. Again,
Deleuze is approaching Kierkegaards problem though in ways that
Kierkegaard did not. It is no longer a search for a restoration of the Self; it is
to search for moments of creation beyond the confines of the Self, until there
is only the it or the non-person, hardly any individuality, but [ ... ]
singularities, a smile, a gesture, a grimacesuch events are not subjective
traits, and hence where affect is created, there is only a belly, a mouth, an
engine, a thingamabob, a baby.66 Reaching the point of the indefinite article
can reduce us to the point where everything we say and think about ourselves
62 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 385.

63 Lawrence Ianni and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lawrence Ferlinghettis Fourth Person
Singular and the Theory of Relativity, in Winsconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 8:3 (1967),
396.
64 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, Her (New York: New Directions, 1988), 93; Ianni and
Lawrence, Lawrence Ferlinghettis Fourth Person Singular and the Theory of Relativity, 400-
401.
65 Ferlinghetti, Her, 93.
66 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 351, 387, 110.

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is discarded, if only for a moment one has combined everything (le tout):
the indefinite article, the infinitive-becoming, and the proper name to which
one is reduced.67 This is why Deleuze often remarks that affect operates at
infinite speed. Not only is art eternal as long as it lasts, it is also something
detached from the rhythms of everyday life. This clarifies why Deleuze finds
that so many novels fail to be art, that is, to create affects: too much ink is
being wasted on recounting private affairs, and too little of it manages the
desirable detachment, singularity, and reduction:
the art of the novel [ ... ] is a misunderstanding: many

people think that novels can be created with our
perceptions and affections, our memories and archives,
[ ... ] and finally with our opinions holding it all
together.68
Architecture, becoming, imperceptibility
Deleuze cannot follow Kierkegaard, since the movement of faith

entails transcendence reinstalled. He thus turns to Cain as the double
betrayer. The activity by which to carry out such double betrayal and opening
to the new is art because only art can create something purely for itself. Affects
are beings: singular, asignifying signs that must be addressed in the fourth
person singular. And Deleuze does not stop there. As affect cannot depend
on emotions, feelings, or bodily states, he concludes that art begins not with
flesh but with the house.69 Art is always the activity by which something is
detached, and such singularization is a matter of framing, of demarcating and
hence decoupling by means of lines, gestures, windows, beams, glass, and so
forth. The affect is not found; it must be built. Art is impossible otherwise and
as such architecture, the first of the arts.70 As a consequence, the design of
buildings is only a subset of a wider architectural domain. For Deleuze,
architecture concerns all art as the necessary condition for the creation of
affect. Cinema is a good example here. Framing a face in close-up can show
fear of resignation as affect. Because of the close-up, context drifts away, and
as the face itself becomes a landscape that fills the entire screen, the actors
identity dissipates. All that remains is a fear or a resignation in which the
affect has been abstracted from all contingent circumstances. At that point, a

68 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 170. Kierkegaard could not agree more,
as he insists that an author should not draw too much on personal experience, lest his actuality
intrude so much that a work becomes mere private talkativeness. Fear and Trembling and
Repetition, 98.
69 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 186, 189, italics mine.
70 Ibid., 179.

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viewer has the rare opportunity to enter into a situation in which there is only
the fourth person singular. The subject-object distinction is then momentarily
denied and immanence is recharged by a moment of contact with
something that does not belong to our quotidian experiences. But this is still
art as a specific practice. How can art and affect be the general mode of
existence par excellence? Deleuzes conceptualizations seem to concern very
isolated moments that will only rarely be created and experienced. The next
step in the sequence of concepts, however, suggests otherwise when Deleuze
asserts that:
... you are [ ... ] a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have

the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life.71
This can be understood by turning to a final concept, that of

becoming: the house takes part in an entire becoming. It is life, the
nonorganic life of things.72 Architecture is part of a movement of becoming,
which reveals the nonorganic life of things. This refers to things taken as
asignifying or in the fourth person singular. This is a constant theme in
Deleuzes philosophy, where anything functioning within a certain structure
or system is always doing so in a second moment, conditioned by something
else. Hence, he writes that real becomings take refuge in art and sweep it
away toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless, and
that affects [are] becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through
them (thereby becoming someone else).73 Becoming is a movement that
belongs to raising compositions to affects, to the detachment and
singularization mentioned earlier. What is becoming in this context of
sensational compounds of affect and percept? Deleuze answers:
sensory becoming is the action by which something

or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other while
continuing to be what they are.74
How to reconcile becoming-other with continuing to be what one is?

Becoming is a movement similar to repetition or the movement of faith in
Kierkegaard: one constantly abandons oneself in favor of something else, but
this very act allows one to remain oneself. Deleuze intends that the mode of
existence preferable for human beings is this becoming-other, as the essence
of selfhood becomes becoming-other: here begins a long and inexhaustible


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story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense.75 After private

individuality, social context, and all transcendent illusions and limiting
grounds are left behind, the only thing remaining is movement itself. With
Kierkegaards knight, this is always done towards and from faith. For him, it
is raising consciousness to the second power, but for Deleuze it is a more
radical raising of consciousness to what he calls the nth power, the double
betrayal of Cain that unshackles us for the sake of allowing for the new. 76
As with Kierkegaard, this requires no spectacle, since movement is
the thing that is imperceptible.77 The mode of existence of being a set of
nonsubjectified affects entails a radical transformation from the perspective
of the life of doxa that Deleuze considers to be the norm, but this
transformation is not physical. Throughout A Thousand Plateaus, the many
examples of becomings (becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and so on) are
always accompanied by the reminder that a man becoming-woman or a child
becoming-horse does not actually become something else in a direct, literal
sense. Hence, becoming a set of asubjectified affects can only concern a
movement on the spot, in other words, a certain attitude or approach to life,
or again in other words, a preference for a specific mode of existence: an
attitude. As with Ferlinghettis true fourth person singular, maintaining this
mode of existence is hard, and one might only succeed in it for a fleeting
moment:
To go unnoticed is by no means easy. To be a stranger,

even to ones doorman or neighbors. If it is so difficult to
be like everybody else, it is because it is an affair of
becoming. Not everybody becomes
everybody/everything [tout le monde], makes a becoming
of everybody/everything. This requires much asceticism,
much sobriety, much creative involution.78
To become tout le monde is to abandon oneself in the precise sense of

realizing situations in which there is no longer a subject-object distinction, in
which a morsel of reality is present as a smile, not this or that smile that I
am interpreting. Since this is a movement on the spot, it is like painting grey
on grey or pink on pink: it might not change anything physically, yet
simultaneously it matters tremendously in how one relates to the world.79
75Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 86.

76Pap. IV B111 n.d., 1843-1844; R III, 229. Deleuze most notably employs the term nth
power throughout Difference and Repetition.
78 Ibid., 279.
79 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11, 197.

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This reveals two reasons why Deleuze describes true becoming as becoming-
imperceptible. Firstly, it is not visible from the outside. Secondly, becoming
puts us in a zone of indiscernibility, in situations in which there is a ...
taking place, and therefore in which it is not at all clear where I stop and
it starts.80
At this point, it is clear why Deleuze considers this mode of existence
as superior to all others. Firstly, it is the only mode in which an event or
encounter is truly appreciated for what it is, as singular and as unmediated
by memory, anticipation, norms, values, language, and so forth. It is an
extremely strict criterion for authenticity, in which even the perspective or
desire of the subject involved is purged. Secondly, it is the only attitude
towards life in which something new can come into being. Only from the
fourth person singular can one say that something, which is then to be taken
as an affect, is not a mere reconfiguration of pre-existing components. Thirdly,
and more generally, much of Deleuzes thought is dedicated to
demonstrating that the self or subject is not given a priori, and concepts such
as affect and becoming are part of his endeavor of describing a world of
experiences and encounters that is more fundamental than our normal way
of seeing things, a world that is in fact constitutive of this normality. Hence,
for Deleuze, the preferable mode of existence, of being a self, is an attitude in
which one tries to have encounters that put the self beyond the self, that make
becoming-other as an always present yet mostly unnoticed constitutive
process, tangible, if only for a moment.
Conclusion
How to look at a work of art? With a cynical, weary eye that can only
see it as resembling other art, as when we utter the clich that everything
has already been done a thousand times before? If so, then there is no art,
just images. For Deleuze, the same is true for living a life. We can easily live
life as though everything derives from circumstance, from history, or from
others. This is life devoid of authenticity. But if so, then there is no life worth
living, or at least no possible future worth entering. To Deleuze, the Cainite
mode of existence, the double betrayal that allows for singular encounters
unshackled from circumstance, is our only chance of experiencing moments
in which something new is created.81 And the experience of the new is
preferable, precisely because it is the only experience that is not (yet) captured
in orders of transcendence, whether common sense and opinion or the
edifices and first principles of philosophy. It is the only mode of existence in
80 This is how one should read what cannot be perceived on one [level] cannot but be
perceived on the other. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 281.


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which immanence can be restored, resulting in Man par excellence. But

this is precisely Man capable of severing his own involvement from the mode of
existence of that which is produced, i.e., art. It must be emphasized that such
moments cannot be forced: an individual subject cannot go out and decide
to have an encounter with the new. Instead, one can only experiment and try
to seek it out: make consciousness an experimentation in life.82 If this does
not strike us as a very practical or concrete rule by which to live, it is only
because it is first and foremost an encouragement to cultivate a certain
attitude. The entire emphasis on viewing ourselves and others as art, on
viewing art as affect, and on understanding affect as an utterable or perceivable
is intended for this: an attitude in life in which we refuse to first see a problem,
a situation, a person, or any other concrete thing in terms of that which it is
not. This is why Deleuze so frequently cries out against stereotypes and
popular opinion, and also why his philosophy has always resonated well
with those who resist racism, sexism, and all other forms of essentialism in
both theory and practice. At the heart of Deleuzes ethics is the attempt to see
things in terms of themselves as much as possible. Not that this is guaranteed
to make the world a better place, but at the very least it might make it more
authentic.
Deleuze calls this choosing to have a choice in which the
alternative is not between terms but between the modes of existence of the
one who chooses, for which he credits Pascals Wager and Kierkegaards
Either/Or as the first texts to develop this insight.83 The true choice is not to
have a life or to create affects, especially not since such matters are highly
asubjective. The self, strictly speaking, does not have the capacity to realize
the proper mode of existence, much like the knight of faith cannot exist
without God restoring the finite for him. The true choice is to believe that a
life and affect are possible in this world. Only the character who makes [this]
true choice raises the affect to its pure power or potentiality.84 In his final
essay, Deleuze cites a Dickens story that perhaps illustrates best how the
affect-creating potential of art can become manifest in life itself:
A scoundrel, a bad apple, held in contempt by everyone,

is found on the point of death, and suddenly those
charged with his care display an urgency, respect, and
even love for the dying mans least sign of life. Everyone
82 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 134. Also see Deleuze and Parnet,
Dialogues, 61. In a striking parallel, it was Kierkegaard who introduced the word experiment into
Danish, as well as the explicit notion of experimenting not experimenting with or on, but a
character. See pages xxii-xxxi of the 1993 International Kierkegaard Commentary.
83 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 114-116; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 177.
84 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 115.

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makes it his business to save him. As a result, the wicked

man himself, in the depths of his coma, feels something
soft and sweet penetrate his soul. But as he progresses
back toward life, his benefactors turn cold, and he
himself rediscovers his old vulgarity and meanness.
Between his life and his death, there is a moment where
a life is merely playing with death.85
This demonstrates why the preferable mode of existence, a moment

in which the fourth person singular is attained, is strictly speaking beyond
good and evil, since only the subject that incarnated [a life] in the midst of
things made it good or bad.86 And this is why Deleuzian ethics are perhaps
existentialist before being anything else. Authenticity resides in the demand
that the value of an act, of a production of something, can never be drawn from
a cherished history, an envisioned future, a desire felt, or a norm obeyed. To
be authentic is to even purge ones own presence from the affect under
consideration, and to evaluate only it in terms of the feelings, perceptions and
consequences that it might bring about. And finally, unlike the knight of faith,
this can no longer concern every waking moment. Much more, it is the kind
of rare occurrence that demands sobriety, work, and the kind of restricted
optimism of one who merely labors to bring about something new, as humble
as the result may be.
Center for Contemporary European Philosophy,

Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
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B. Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1986).
85 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 386.

86 Ibid., 387.

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___________, Cinema 2 - The Time Image, trans. By H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
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Deleuze After Kierkegaard

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KRITIKE VOLUME EIGHT NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2014) 98-118

Art as Authentic Life

Abstract: There is an underappreciated existentialist side to Deleuzes

Keywords: Life, art, authenticity, ethics

Khalfa (2000), and Somers-Hall (2006).

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

frequent use of Kierkegaards thought in ways that go far beyond casual

The problem of a life

In the essay Immanence: A Life, Deleuze repeatedly insists that life is

conceptualization of repetition amounts to following Kierkegaards wish to carry out the

and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

references to Nietzsche and dancing in Difference and Repetition). Adding a Kierkegaardian

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

is where Kierkegaard comes in.9 Deleuzes discussions on a life and the

Life as a knight of faith

Fear and Trembling and Repetition famously address the problem of

are just as problematic as Aesthetic and Ethic existence.

13 John D. Caputo, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Foundering of Metaphysics, in

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

18 FT III, 105, 111, 124.

contingency, and opposes them to absoluteness and necessity.

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

As is written, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

But to be able to lose ones understanding and along

The knight of faith makes a twofold movement: surrendering the

not do so, no one can understand me. FT III, 110.

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

26 FT III, 106, 120.

32 FT III, 89, 110, 115.

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

These two figures, a movement putting a single individual in relation

Abraham becomes Cain

As with Kierkegaards disavowal of recollection, Deleuze asserts that

herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence

With such similarities, it is not surprising that Kierkegaards knight

35 Atheism is the philosophers serenity and philosophys achievement. Deleuze and

37 Ibid., 70, 203.

38 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 8; Shunning judgment by others and rejoicing in

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

Undoubtedly, faith possesses sufficient force to undo

By relying on God to restore the finite, the knight of faith is

Kierkegaards knight of the faith, he who makes the

40 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 95.

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

Deleuze shifts the parameters of the problem. It now concerns the

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

Affect, sign, fourth person singular

Affect is introduced to Deleuzes philosophy in two studies on

46 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 256.

50 Affects are beings. Deleuze and Guattari, What is philosophy?, 164.

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

This becomes Deleuzes hallmark of authenticity: not so much

it is an utterable. We mean that, when language gets

In addition, an affect-percept compound is eternal and thus absolute

The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 29.

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

produce a sensation that defies every opinion and

This helps to understand what Deleuze means when writing that

2014 Arjen Kleinherenbrink

We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and

In leaving behind all enslaving, stifling modes of existence, affect

62 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 385.

66 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 351, 387, 110.